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Progressives at the city level face all sorts of constraints, from business interests to hostile state legislatures. But we shouldn’t preemptively clip our wings: left reformers like Chicago’s Brandon Johnson can transform cities into pro-worker havens.

Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson speaks to supporters during a rally at the UIC Forum on March 30, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois. (Jim Vondruska / Getty Images)

An outbreak of yellow fever struck Baltimore in the summer of 1800, claiming the lives of over a thousand residents. In a letter to Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson looked on what he thought was the bright side of this deadly epidemic. “The yellow fever,” the sage of Monticello intoned, “will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation; & I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.”

Jefferson and many of his contemporaries viewed the yeoman farmer as the repository of republican virtue and sought to defend agrarian society against the advance of urban life. The political system they designed systematically disadvantaged urban areas relative to rural ones, and politically subordinated cities to their respective state governments.

US cities are weak, but as the legal scholar Richard Schragger argues in his excellent book City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age, they are not powerless. By focusing on the provision of public services and expanding the scope of home rule, Schragger argues, urban progressives can improve people’s lives and build capacity to exercise power at the state and federal levels.

Here, he speaks with Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano about the political potential of cities and what he would recommend to Chicago’s progressive mayor-elect, Brandon Johnson.

Chris Maisano

There seem to be two big nuggets of conventional wisdom regarding cities out there, one from the Left and one from more business-friendly quarters. From the Left, we often hear that cities can’t do much on their own to address big urban problems like poverty or inadequate housing. From the pro-business side, we hear that local governments need to be “business-friendly,” which in practice often entails giving out public subsidies, in order to attract and hold onto mobile capital. You’re skeptical of both those views.

Richard Schragger

Yes, that’s exactly right. On the progressive side, there has been a tendency over the course of the twentieth century toward centralization. This is the idea that the federal government has to come in and provide the kinds of goods that are necessary to deal with poverty, housing, equality, health care — the whole range of things provided by the social welfare state. Meanwhile, there is a skeptical view of the capacity or ability of local governments to engage in redistribution of any kind. The idea is that cities have to compete for mobile capital, and if they tax or regulate too much, mobile capital will flee. White flight and deindustrialization are explained in this way.

I resist both accounts in the book. First, I think both sides are too committed to centralization and, frankly, too skeptical of city power. City-based politics is a fruitful place to do many of the things progressives would like to see done, and redistribution is more possible than traditional accounts of the social welfare state assume.

The idea that cities can ‘compete’ — with the suburbs, with other cities — their way into economic growth is simplistic and misleading.

So, too, the competitive model of city policymaking has just not been shown to be true. Cities have been business-friendly and tax-shy forever — it’s not that cities have failed because they’ve pursued grossly mistaken policies. Cities are affected by structural features of the economy. The idea that they can “compete” — with the suburbs, with other cities — their way into economic growth is simplistic and misleading.

Consider, for example, the urban resurgence of the last few decades. And consider the current work-from-home revolution. We have seen in a short time dramatic changes in how cities are perceived, who lives in them, where work occurs, and how economic growth proceeds. The competition story is not plausible. And cities have resources to engage in the kinds of social welfare spending that we often think is not possible.

The living wage movement in this country started as a city-based movement and continues to be a city-based movement. Revived labor rights and unionization efforts are enjoying the most success in urban places.

Chris Maisano

In City Power, you say you have three big preoccupations: the mechanics of local economic growth, the scope of city agency, and the role legal institutions play in shaping those two things. Walk us through the main points you make regarding each of those topics.

Richard Schragger

When we talk about “city power,” sometimes we’re talking about cities’ economic wherewithal and by extension their fiscal capacity. Other times we are talking about cities’ formal legal authority in the context of a federal system.

One overriding question is: What makes cities thrive, and what leads to their decline? But we also have to ask what we mean when we say cities are thriving. Do we mean that they have high property values and low tax rates? Do we mean that they’ve attracted investment? Do we mean that they’re good for employers or employees? Do we mean that they have a decent quality of life for all residents, including lower- and moderate-income residents and not just the rich?  We sometimes think of the city as one entity, but of course there are multiple interests in the city.

City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age by Richard Schragger. (Oxford University Press)

As for the mechanics of local economic growth, I call for modesty in the book. We actually don’t have a great account of why certain places thrive and why certain places decline. We think we do, but we frequently tell just-so stories, often based in technological change. One story might be, well, the Sunbelt cities prospered because of the invention of air conditioning. Well, it turns out it’s pretty hot in Chicago in the summer too. So air conditioning doesn’t quite explain what’s going on.

No one predicted the urban resurgence of the last two decades. In 1974, if you looked at New York City’s budget woes, you probably wouldn’t have invested in New York City real estate. If you lived in Detroit in 1954, at the peak of its population, you may have rightly believed that the city was going to continue to prosper as it did in the previous decades. We have to be careful about what we mean by economic development and how it happens. Jane Jacobs, whose work I draw on in my book, spent much of her life struggling with this very question.

We have to ask what we mean when we say cities are thriving. Do we mean that they have high property values and low tax rates? Do we mean that they’re good for employers or employees?

As for the scope of city agency, I ask whether a city has the fiscal and legal capacity to pursue certain goals. In the United States, cities are fairly weak, legally and politically. They have a lot of responsibilities to manage their economies, take care of their residents, provide social services like education and public safety, and yet they don’t necessarily have the resources to do so. Their autonomy is selective. Cities often have the formal right to act, but not the political ability to actually do anything.

Much of my book, City Power, is about the relationship between different levels of government in our federal system, and particularly the relationship between state legislatures and the city. The state-local relationship is the most important because state legislatures formally control cities and dictate the powers cities can exercise. They are also important because city leaders have to constantly negotiate with state leaders for resources.

Chris Maisano

In the US constitutional system, cities are considered creatures of their state governments, right?

Richard Schragger

Yes. State legislatures can, and in many cases have, changed the borders of cities, eliminated cities, and taken over their governance in various ways. To be sure, many state constitutions have home-rule provisions in their state constitutions, which are meant to protect some amount of city power. These provisions were adopted in various waves starting in the nineteenth century and then continuing into the twentieth century.

But “home rule” is weak even in those states that have what we would consider robust home-rule provisions. That is because home-rule provisions still allow states to override local decision-making, something legal scholars call “state law preemption.”

The rise in preemptive state policymaking has been one of the most dramatic political phenomena of the last half-decade or so. Cities are under attack today in many states. Blue cities are responding to progressive constituencies, and red state legislatures or governors are hostile to that politics. But the hostility to the exercise of city power also occurs in blue states.

Chris Maisano

The US left is very much an urban phenomenon today. I don’t think we’re going to be able to change that condition anytime soon. How is this situation a strength for the Left, and how is it a weakness?

Richard Schragger

Our federal system is based in part on the idea that states will have different policy preferences to some degree. A federal system is ideally designed to respect some of that diversity. But in fact, what we’re seeing is an urban/rural split within states. It’s not red states and blue states, it’s red rural areas and blue metropolitan or urban areas. Our state-based federal system simply does not track the most salient political divide in our politics today.

That phenomenon has actually been around for quite a while. Jonathan Rodden published a book recently called Why Cities Lose, which traces the urban/rural divide from the 1920s and even before that. Indeed, we see the urban/rural divide in state constitutional reform debates in the nineteenth century. In that era, folks worried about the power of the city over the rural areas — cities were growing, and wealth was increasingly concentrated there. Rural representatives were worried about political domination. So state legislators and state constitution-makers restricted city power by limiting city representation in state legislatures. Mind you, this was before the one-person-one-vote decisions, in which the US Supreme Court disallowed that kind of malapportionment. US politics has long been characterized by hostility to cities.

What we’re seeing is an urban/rural split within states. It’s not red states and blue states, it’s red rural areas and blue metropolitan or urban areas.

The plus for urban-based political movements is their capacity to generate good policy outcomes for their cities and the use of cities as a base for policymaking at the state and national level. The drawback is that the city itself, as I’ve pointed out, is weak legally, and can be weak politically if city residents aren’t able to exercise power in the state legislature.

So, too, at the federal level, we’ve got a bias toward low-population, rural states; the US Senate and the Electoral College are the main problems here. Every state gets two senators, so there’s an anti-urban bias built into our national politics that is difficult to overcome. If progressives are isolated in urban areas, that means they’re going to be at a structural disadvantage in the national political process.

Now, that points to a different strategy, which is for reformers to actually exercise power at the local level and protect that power. That’s a big part of the argument of City Power generally.

Chris Maisano

One policy area that mayors at least nominally have a lot of control over is policing. For instance, former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, at least early in his term, tried to do something to address people’s concerns with the police, but ran into very strong resistance. Despite the nominal authority, there are lots of complications in practice. Why do you think mayors often struggle to exercise authority over agencies they nominally have control over, particularly police departments?

Richard Schragger

We’ve seen a lot of struggles recently between mayors and their police departments, like in Chicago currently. Part of this is that any chief executive is going have trouble getting a handle on city agencies and exerting control over them.

It’s hard to do with policing in particular because the mayor may have authority to, say, hire and fire a police chief or dip down into the higher echelons of the police department. But they don’t have much to do with the hiring and firing of the rank-and-file officers, and the rank-and-file have certain kinds of views and positions. If you get into an adversarial relationship with the rank-and-file, that can be very damaging to your mayoralty and can be really tough.

And some of that is unfair. Crime rates are difficult to control. They do not seem to be responsive to particular policies, though we often pretend otherwise. But because crime and public safety is so directly attributed to the mayor, mayors get blamed.

Chris Maisano

Returning to the question of home rule, New York’s home-rule situation is not particularly favorable. It’s very heavily circumscribed by state law. But at least as far as I can tell, expanding home rule doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda here right now. Do you think urban progressives should put more time and effort into expanding home rule?

Richard Schragger

Yes, I am strongly in favor of putting this at the top of all of our policy agendas. It’s hard to get people excited about the distribution of power between the state and local governments, because it’s abstract. It seems detached from the kinds of interests that most people have. In fact, they might not care where their favored policy gets adopted. In most cases, advocates want their favored policies adopted nationally or statewide, and it’s only third best to have that policy adopted at the local level, even though that’s the place where it would do the most good.

But I think to be effective in our policymaking and advocacy, we have to get our minds around the distribution of power in a federal system, because it has really significant effects. The preemption explosion is just one example of how progressive policies at the local level can be easily dismantled by states.

We have to get our minds around the distribution of power in a federal system, because it has really significant effects.

I was part of the drafting committee that wrote up the Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century, which is a National League of Cities (NLC) publication. The idea was to give local governments, and cities in particular, more authority to do the things that are being demanded of them and also to provide cities with the fiscal capacity to do so.

The Principles recommend state assistance for cities in maintaining fiscal stability — including not imposing unfunded mandates of various kinds, which make it hard for the city to do its work, and giving cities ample taxing authority so they can raise revenue. The Principles don’t call for absolute local autonomy across the board, but instead they favor a presumption that when the city governs, city policies should not be overridden except for when the state has a really serious statewide interest in doing so.

With a federal system that is structurally biased against cities, home rule should be part of the reformist agenda across the country, in all states. In the Progressive Era, reformers pursued home rule first and then sought to adopt policies once those policies could be insulated from contrary state commands.

Chris Maisano

Because this issue is fairly abstract, I can anticipate a counterargument from within progressive reform circles that we should just go where the power currently is, which is the state level. Elect as many leftists and progressives to the state legislature as possible, try to elect the best governor possible, focus on the state. What would you say to that?

Richard Schragger

I understand that as a matter of political strategy. If you want to advance your policies you’re going to try to do so at every level of government. You’re going to pursue those policies by supporting candidates at the local, state, and federal levels.

But I do think it is a mistake conceptually and strategically to put one’s hope in unreliable centralized institutions, especially the presidency and Congress. Reformist movements need to show that policies can work at the local level, need to create momentum and interest there, and need a core of supporters and advocates who want to protect what they have created in their communities. This goes beyond cities. Rural outreach requires showing how policies at the local level can be effective. Defending local prerogatives is also a potent political issue.

With a federal system that is structurally biased against cities, home rule should be part of the reformist agenda across the country, in all states.

Living wage movements that eventually resulted in higher state minimums started in the cities. But we should also observe that the living wage movement has gotten derailed by state preemptive laws in many places. This leads to the realization, “Uh oh, I guess the structure of government matters a lot!”

I think it’s a mistake for progressives to think that decentralized local government is an enemy. There are certainly forms of decentralized local government that are oppressive and exclusionary. But I think on balance, progressives should rethink their allergy to localism. We’ve seen how destructive that can be, just in the last few years.

Chris Maisano

One place where progressives have put a lot of energy into building and exercising power is Chicago, which just elected Brandon Johnson to be the next mayor. Illinois’s home-rule provision in its state constitution seems to provide fairly substantial leeway to local governments, so there may be room there for a strongly progressive governing agenda. I know this is a hard question, but if Brandon Johnson and his transition team came knocking on your door for advice, what would you tell them?

Richard Schragger

That’s a difficult question — I’ll send them City Power!

There’s a political reality, there’s a fiscal reality, and then there are opportunities. The political reality is even if you have a significant amount of home rule, you’re always constrained by your state legislature. You have to figure out how to exercise influence in that realm in order to gain the authority you need to do the things you want. That can be tricky, obviously, so a partnership with state officials is always necessary. Make alliances with state officials — that’s just what you have to do as the mayor.

There are also some serious fiscal constraints. Illinois and Chicago both struggle with pension and other significant liabilities. One always worries about taxing capacity and ability. To be an equitable city requires balancing the need for revenue with the need to favor revenue sources that meet the general needs of everyone in the city. The goal is to rebuild an urban middle class, not exacerbate the wide disparity between the rich and poor that is characteristic of our current economy.

Focus on your schools, focus on healthcare, focus on transportation, and public safety. That’s not easy; it’s very hard. But those are the things that cities should be doing.

But I do think there are possibilities we often foreclose. In City Power, I argue that mayors are often preoccupied with economic development policy and “attracting jobs.” I argue that what they should focus on instead are basic municipal services. Focus on your schools, focus on healthcare, focus on transportation, and public safety. That’s not easy; it’s very hard. But those are the things that cities should be doing.

A lot of mayors focus on big redevelopment projects aimed at drawing folks into the city in various ways. This is what I call an “attract-and-retain” strategy, and it emphasizes providing amenities to wealthy or “desirable” incomers and tax breaks to businesses, instead of focusing on what current residents need. Attract and retain is not a viable strategy — it simply does not work. My argument in City Power is that a growth agenda is a mistake, in large part because we do not know what encourages or discourages growth.

Thus, the city should instead pursue justice to the best of its ability. Mayors should seek to build an urban-based politics that recognizes that what we think of as the city’s limited capacity is really a political claim, not an economic one. Once we do that, we can start reimagining what the city is truly capable of.

The black population in the United States is roughly the size of the population of Spain. Yet too many ignore class differences and political complexities among millions of African Americans.

People participate in a march in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter and to commemorate the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth on June 19, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

At forty-seven million, the African American population in the United States is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Despite the size of one of America’s largest minorities, discussions of black politics tend to be reductive and ahistorical. In cavalier fashion, critics of racism chart a long line of oppression that has its origin in the United States’ earliest days. Similarly, the forces that have, according to the dominant view of American racism, sought to oppose this monolithic racial tyranny have all fought under the single banner of “the black liberation struggle.”

Admittedly, these attempts to examine the history of discrimination offer correctives to right-wing defenses of forms of ascriptive hierarchy. However, they do so at the cost of flattening the complexities of actually existing black politics. This approach ignores, the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr tells Jacobin, that black politics is not immune from the economic and class forces which have and continue to shape American politics more broadly.

Jennifer C. Pan

You’ve been a longtime critic of the notion of a cohesive or transhistorical “black freedom movement,” or the idea that one can trace an unbroken line from the fight to abolish slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Why isn’t this framework helpful for understanding black politics either now or in the past?

Adolph Reed

When people talk about something called the “black freedom movement” or the “black liberation struggle” or the “long civil rights movement,” they’re rehashing an old trope that goes back to the beginnings of the study of black American political history and black American political thought. At that time, that construct was called something like the “Negro’s struggle for freedom” or “Negro’s quest for equality.” Both then and now, the construct presumes, first of all, that black people are a singular collective entity. It also presumes an overarching struggle where black people have always unanimously wanted the same thing, and that whatever disagreements you might encounter if you go through the archives of black politics are just disagreements within a fundamentally shared commitment.

Any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it obscures class differentiation among black Americans.

So the main problem with the idea of a timeless black freedom movement is that it’s a single-thread narrative and a reduction of a much more complex reality. The narrative posits racial unity as the essential foundation for understanding black people and constructs and imposes an anti-historical understanding of black people’s experiences in American political life. It defines black people as being somehow outside of history and collapses differences in historical moments by presuming that people are fighting for the same things in 2020 that they were fighting for in 1860 — or 1619, for God’s sake — which is absurd.

Jennifer C. Pan

Why do you think people find this idea of a singular and cohesive black freedom movement so compelling?

Adolph Reed

I think there are several reasons. One is simply that people have heard it over and over, so it seems to comport with commonsense knowledge. It’s a framework that gives you the familiar dyads of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois versus Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr. That’s convenient for people who don’t think there’s anything complex that goes on among black people.

Then there are people who have an interest in propagating the narrative. The black freedom movement construct has always functioned to obscure real distinctions among black people. Fundamentally, the most aggressive and insistent proponents of this view have been people who are pushing a class program: any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it’s part of a discourse of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call racecraft, which obscures class differentiation among black Americans, with or without conscious intent. If the black freedom movement narrative were even a reasonably accurate account of black American political history, then you could say, okay, well, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it. But it’s not. It’s false and it works for the other side.

The alternative to this kind of simplistic approach is to recognize that black people, like all people, live within historical circumstances. They’re diverse and have different interests and perceptions, not only at different points in time, but also at the same point. That was true in the nineteenth century and even true to some extent in the eighteenth century. It’s certainly true after Emancipation and once black people were able to claim some kind of civic participation, however badly the deck may have been stacked against them. Eric Foner has compiled a list of black people who held elected office in the South by the end of Reconstruction, and there were hundreds of people who had been elected to all kinds of offices. And that suggests that there was a lively culture of political debate and struggle, and that blacks engaged with nonblacks, as they always have and continue to do today.

It really comes down to following an injunction from Ralph Ellison: he cautioned observers of American life against the tendency to believe things about black people that they would not believe about any other human beings.

Jennifer C. Pan

How, then, should we think about black politics now, particularly after the 2020 racial reckoning?

Adolph Reed

I’m probably getting more crotchety by the day, but I would almost argue at this point that the most crucial racial reckoning in US history was at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1864.

Anyway, to answer your question, at the beginning of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Touré [Reed] was talking to a mutual friend and colleague who was part of the campaign’s inner circle and encouraged the campaign not to concentrate on pursuing something called the “black vote” as much as they could possibly avoid it. His argument was that what we think of as “black politics” today is a class-specific interest-group politics that’s rooted entirely in the black professional and managerial strata, whose approach to political life is race reductionist. It’s an elite-driven activity that really has no base at all. And the reality is that once you start catering to the idea of a coherent “black vote” or “black community,” it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.

Once you start catering to the idea of a coherent ‘black vote’ or ‘black community,’ it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.

And then there’s the Potemkin thing that happens whenever there’s a police atrocity or some other outrage: people respond to the outrage with protest actions, and then somebody who’s articulate and MSNBC-ready jumps out in front of the protest and talks to the media and is declared the new voice of the black youth or the rising wave of the future.

The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.

There’s another tendency in this type of politics that I trace back to the buildup to the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999. There were activists during that moment who complained that the movement was too white and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to affected “communities.” And I’d say to people, look, if there’s some constituency that isn’t involved that you think ought to be — and you purport to have connections to that constituency — then the thing to do is for you to go out and organize them and bring them into the movement.

Well, of course nobody who was complaining actually wanted that; what they wanted was just the opposite. They wanted to represent or embody the amorphous, voiceless masses. And that’s really the only context — that and nineteenth-century race theory — within which it makes sense to assume that the black American population, which is bigger than the entire population of Canada, can be spoken for in the first person plural.

Jennifer C. Pan

You and Walter Benn Michaels have a new book out, No Politics But Class Politics. Over the years you’ve both been sharply critical of the tendency to focus on racial disparities. While there do exist plenty of liberals whose idea of justice is a diverse ruling class, what would you tell leftists who oppose the capitalist order but also want to take racism seriously? What does it mean to fight racism today?

Adolph Reed

Of course we should do what we can to protect and buttress the antidiscrimination apparatus, which includes an affirmative dimension. But this might also be of interest to readers:

In 1945, when the Full Employment Bill was still in play in Congress, the civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray wrote an article in the California Law Review on employment discrimination. In the article, she addresses the argument that you have to fight racism or discrimination before you can win social democracy. She points out that the reality is that racism becomes most politically viable in conditions of scarcity: when jobs are scarce, that’s when people get anxious, and that’s when employers and right-wingers can mobilize the anxiety. And so Murray argues that because of that, the only way to move forward as black workers is to win the social democratic reforms — in particular, at that moment, the struggle for a real political commitment to ground national economic policy on the pursuit and maintenance of a full employment economy — and that those are ultimately even more important than the antidiscrimination measures themselves.

Most people in this country who work for a living need the same things, right? And we don’t necessarily need to have a fight over what happened in 1860, or a fight over what happened in 1890, or even 1920, or even 1960 to recognize that we all need economic security, health care, jobs, and education. And the way for us to get to those things is to articulate our needs and to come together around the things we have in common.

When the anti-racist sensibility now is that making a reference to the working class is somehow conceding to white racism, it’s pretty clear what the class character of this politics is. And this is even before you start counting up all the billions of corporate and investor-class dollars that have gone to Black Lives Matter and other nominal antiracist activist groups since the murder of George Floyd.

So it’s time for us to stop playing around and to be serious and hardheaded about this. Especially for those of us who are professors, part of our job is trying to get the story straight, to demystify the mystifications. That’s what we do for a living, right? Otherwise, we should all just go to church.

Born in Bulgaria, Christian Rakovsky became a major leader of the Russian Revolution who wanted the Soviet Union to be a true partnership of nations. But when Rakovsky challenged Stalin’s dictatorship, he was tried and executed on a trumped-up charge.

Christian Rakovsky photographed circa 1920. (Wikimedia Commons)

It is almost impossible to conceive that the rise and fall of the international Marxist movement in the first half of the twentieth century could be embodied in the fate of one individual. Yet the life of Christian Georgievich Rakovsky (1873–1941) exemplifies, almost like no other, a whole generation of European left-wing intellectuals who were embedded in the socialist and labor movements — an unswerving commitment that defined their lives from beginning to end.

Rakovsky was erased from history by his executioner, Joseph Stalin. But we can chart the drama of the upheavals that engulfed Eurasia in those decades by the arc of his life: student, labor, and antiwar activist, political publicist, prolific author in numerous languages, medical doctor, Bolshevik leader, head of the infant Ukrainian state, Red Army leader, Soviet diplomat, anti-fascist, and anti-Stalinist.

Balkan Questions

Bulgarian by birth, Rakovsky was a scion of a relatively wealthy family that in the 1860s had actively fought for Bulgarian independence against the Ottoman Empire. In these turbulent times, “the national question” and social issues shaped his thinking. His politicization led to his exclusion from Bulgarian education at the age of fifteen for leading a student protest. Henceforth, his education and his political involvement were increasingly multinational.

From 1889 onward, he was active in the social democratic movements of Bulgaria and Romania. In 1891, he departed Bulgaria for Geneva, a hotbed of left-wing political émigrés, where he joined a student socialist circle and published in the Bulgarian journal Social-Demokrat. Enrolled as a medical student, he became acquainted with Marxist luminaries such as Friedrich Engels, Georgi Plekhanov, and Rosa Luxemburg.

He was soon a prolific journalist and energetic political activist. In 1893, he organized the Second International Congress of Socialist Students and represented Bulgaria at the International Socialist Congress in Zurich. Three years later, he was a delegate to the fourth congress of the Second International held in London. This gathering was characterized by fierce disputes, notably between Vladimir Lenin and Luxemburg on the question of national self-determination.

The young Rakovsky distinguished himself as a medical student. He graduated from the University of Montpellier in 1897 with a provocative and highly regarded dissertation which argued for a socioeconomic approach to the “causes of crime and degeneration” rather than an anthropological, atavistic one. But his real calling was not medicine, which he only practiced for six months in the Romanian army, but politics — and a risky one at that.

Rakovsky led a campaign in defense of Russian sailors who had fled to Romania after famously mutinying on the battleship Potemkin.

He was forced to flee tsarist St Petersburg in 1899 to avoid arrest after speaking about the debates between the Russian populists, who saw the traditional peasant commune as a vehicle for revolution, and the Marxists, who looked to the working class, as he did. A year later, after again being deported from the Russian capital for “inflammatory” speechmaking, he journeyed to Paris to participate in the International Socialist Congress.

Once there, he linked up with the Bulgarian and Serbian social democrats and went on to represent them at the 1904 Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam. The following year he departed for Romania where he established Workers’ Romania, the newspaper of the Romanian Socialist Party. At the same time, he led a campaign in defense of sailors who had fled to Romania after famously mutinying on the battleship Potemkin during the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Resisting War

Deportation and incarceration became fixtures of Rakovsky’s curriculum vitae. The Romanian authorities declared him to be a socialist agitator and held him responsible for peasant uprisings that swept through the country, and in 1907, he was deported. It took a five-year mass campaign in his favor before he was allowed to return.

He did not waste those years in exile. He represented the Romanian socialists at congresses in Stuttgart and Copenhagen and the Bureau of the Socialist International at the first conference of Balkan socialist parties in Belgrade in 1911. He soon demonstrated his antiwar convictions, denouncing the first Balkan War (1912–13) as an “infamous and criminal . . .  war of conquest.” For Rakovsky, the only legitimate war was class war.

Rakovsky’s initial response to the outbreak of World War I was ambiguous. He did not condemn the social democrats in the belligerent countries who were voting for war credits. While he saw Serbia, France, and Belgium as under attack by Germany and Austria, he campaigned with the Romanian social democrats in favor of Romanian neutrality against two competing pro-war parties: Russophiles and Germanophiles.

However, the establishment of the Union Sacrée in France, which saw the veteran socialist Jules Guesde join the government, combined with the influence of discussions with his friend Leon Trotsky and fierce criticism from Lenin to quickly radicalize Rakovsky’s stance. He went from advocating neutrality to opposing imperialist war and began to identify with Trotsky’s position of “peace without indemnity or annexation, without victors or vanquished.”

Lenin, however, called for the “transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war.” He condemned the failure to fight for this objective as an opportunist “Kautskyist evil.” The tensions between Rakovsky and Lenin were stark at the Zimmerwald antiwar conference, held between September 5 and 8, 1915, in which Rakovsky was a key player.

Zimmerwald marked a real turning point for Rakovsky, who finally repudiated the Second International in favor of a new revolutionary international.

Rakovsky supported the final conference manifesto drafted by Trotsky. Lenin and his Zimmerwald Left delegates finally voted for this document, seeing it as a step toward breaking with social democratic opportunism, despite their reservations about the manifesto’s lack of analysis of opportunism or of how to struggle against the war.

Zimmerwald, however, marked a real turning point for Rakovsky, who finally repudiated the Second International in favor of a new revolutionary international. He now rejected the idea of national “defensism.” He abandoned the indeterminate opposition to war that had been adopted at the Second International’s 1907 Stuttgart conference, looking instead for revolution in the belligerent states as the way to end the conflict and seeking to formulate the tactics needed to promote it.

At the February 1916 Berne conference of the Zimmerwald movement executive, Rakovsky boasted that he was “at Lenin’s side.” He categorically condemned wartime national unity, supported the goal of establishing a Third International to replace the Second, and advocated socialist revolution as a means to end the war. As a Berne newspaper put it at the time, he was the “most internationalist figure of the revolutionary European movement.”

The Russian Revolution

After returning to Romania, Rakovsky was arrested in September 1916, a month after the Romanian army joined the conflict on the side of the Entente powers. The February 1917 revolution in Imperial Russia proved to be his salvation. Rakovsky was released on May Day 1917 “in the name of the Russian Revolution” by a Russian garrison stationed in Romania.

Now aged forty-four, he immediately went to revolutionary Russia and joined Lenin’s Bolshevik Party straight after the October Revolution. In the name of the Romanian people, Rakovsky hailed “the triumph of the proletarian and peasant revolution in Russia.” For their part, the Bolsheviks saluted an illustrious new recruit, the “famous Romanian leader” and “renowned internationalist.”

The infant Soviet revolution was threatened by German forces which occupied Ukraine in the spring of 1918. Rakovsky was entrusted with the task of negotiating with Pavlo Skoropadsky, who had become hetman of Ukraine in a German-backed coup, in order to defuse possible hostilities. The German Revolution of November 1918 put an end to that immediate threat.

In the name of the Romanian people, Rakovsky hailed ‘the triumph of the proletarian and peasant revolution in Russia.’

However, the German military detained Rakovsky in his new role as an emissary of the pan-Russian soviets to the Berlin Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. After his release, Lenin assigned Rakovsky an even more challenging role as Bolshevik leader in Ukraine, now one of the main battlegrounds of the civil war between the Red and White Armies.

In this cauldron, Rakovsky wore multiple Bolshevik hats: chair of the Ukrainian Soviet of People’s Commissars, president of its defense council, commissar of foreign affairs, and politburo member of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (CP(b)U). Rakovsky’s multiethnic curriculum vitae, not to mention his courage, energy, and political experience, made him the right choice for the jobs he had to do.

The fledgling Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (UkSSR), declared on March 10, 1919 in Kharkiv, was almost stillborn. The Red Army had to confront a succession of ferocious counterrevolutionary opponents, including Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian People’s Army and Anton Denikin’s White forces, as well as French and Polish interventionists. The tide of battle shifted dramatically several times, as did the politico-military alliances, until the Soviet-Polish treaty of March 1921 finally brought the fighting to an end.

Nationalism and Internationalism

Social conditions in 1919–21 were far from propitious for Rakovsky’s Ukrainian Soviet government. The conditions of a ruthless civil war, combined with the draconian Bolshevik policies of “War Communism” and agricultural requisitioning, shattered the economy and angered the populace — particularly the peasantry, who made up 80 percent of the population and were predominantly Ukrainian.

The urban centers were the bulwarks of the CP(b)U, particularly in the industrial Donbas. The population in those areas was largely ethnic Russian and Jewish, which reinforced anti-Russian and antisemitic stereotypes about the nature of Bolshevism.

Rakovsky had no truck with Ukrainian nationalism: in view of what he considered the “weakness and anaemia” of the Ukrainian proletariat, he deemed the idea of an independent Ukraine to be a dangerous concession to counterrevolution and Western imperialism. At this point, he dismissed any ethnographic distinctions between Ukrainians and Russians or concerns about the threat of Russification.

According to Rakovsky, Ukrainian nationalism was an artificial force imposed by the intelligentsia. From his perspective, the imperatives of class struggle and international socialist revolution were decisive, and he described the Ukrainian revolutionary struggle as “the decisive factor in the world revolution.”

Rakovsky’s perspective on Ukrainian nationalism shifted dramatically with the end of the civil war, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921, and the negotiations about the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922–23. In the course of these discussions, he confronted Joseph Stalin, who was intent on building a centralized USSR dominated by its largest republic, Russia. This ignored the fears of a dying Lenin about the return of Great Russian domination.

As head of Soviet Ukraine, Rakovsky vehemently argued for federal equality between the founding republics of the USSR.

As head of Soviet Ukraine, Rakovsky vehemently argued for federal equality between the founding republics of the USSR (Ukraine, Russia, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia). He denounced Stalin’s “dead-handed centralism” and its “insensitivity” toward non-Russian, peasant nationalities as a threat to “Soviet power.”

The new Soviet leader ultimately defeated Rakovsky on this question: while Stalin formally accepted the principle of a Soviet federation of national equals, in reality, he went on to establish a hypercentralized USSR with Moscow at its helm. He never forgave Rakovsky, who was removed as head of the Ukrainian government in July 1923.

Rakovsky was appointed Soviet ambassador to the UK (1923–25) and subsequently to France (1925–27). As he wrote to Stalin, these postings were merely a pretext “to banish me from my work in Ukraine.” It was not to be Rakovsky’s last period in exile.

Opposing Bureaucracy

Rakovsky was increasingly concerned about the emergence of a governmental bureaucracy in the USSR that would stifle both republican national independence and Soviet democracy. Just before his removal as head of the Ukrainian government, Rakovsky warned against the rise of a “separate estate of officials who joined their fate to centralization itself.”

Rakovsky’s opposition to Stalin’s centralizing project drove him to support the Left Opposition led by Trotsky, which he publicly endorsed in August 1927. Soon afterward, the French authorities declared Rakovsky to be persona non grata on their soil and he returned to the USSR. He immediately threw himself into the Left Opposition’s campaign during the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the All-Union Communist Party Congress that was due to be held in December 1927.

During this period, Rakovsky addressed factory and party meetings, especially in Ukraine, despite harassment and outright thuggery from Stalin’s regime. He was soon expelled from the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and finally from the Communist Party itself in December 1927.

In the aftermath of the Left Opposition’s defeat, Rakovsky was arrested and exiled to southern Russia and Siberia.

In the aftermath of the Left Opposition’s defeat, Rakovsky was arrested and exiled to southern Russia and Siberia. While in exile, he elaborated on his thinking about Stalinist bureaucratization in a seminal analysis titled “The ‘Professional Dangers’ of Power,” which was published in the Left Opposition’s clandestine bulletin in 1929. As his biographer Pierre Broué observed, Rakovsky’s analysis was “the first serious attempt by the opposition to come to terms historically and theoretically with the phenomenon of bureaucratic degeneration.”

The article was a searching analysis of the degeneration and bureaucratization of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. The starting point of Rakovsky’s explanation was the passivity and depoliticization of the Soviet working class. He argued that this class was not the same social force that had taken power in October 1917. The postrevolutionary working class had not experienced the same baptism of fire that had previously unified it and driven the revolution.

War and terrible economic conditions had certainly taken their toll. However, Rakovsky believed that the primary cause was the failure of the Communist Party to educate this reconstituted working class in the spirit of Soviet socialism. He attributed that failure in turn to the bankruptcy of the party and state elites, whose privileged living conditions were far removed from those of the working class:

When a class takes power, one of its parts becomes the agent of that power. Thus arises bureaucracy. In a socialist state, where capitalist accumulation is forbidden by members of the directing party, this differentiation begins as a functional one; it later becomes a social one. . . . Certain functions formerly satisfied by the party as a whole, by the whole class, have now become the attributes of power, that is, only of a certain number of persons in the party and this class.

The result was “the intoxication of power,” Rakovsky wrote, citing the French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. As remedies for this problem, the Left Opposition should propose not only a thorough purging of the party apparatus but also the reeducation of the party membership and the broader populace.

Rakovsky modestly suggested that this was merely a preliminary analysis of the revolution’s malaise. Yet his ally Trotsky enthusiastically praised the essay and urged that it be disseminated as widely as possible. It later provided the starting point for Trotsky’s own famous anti-Stalinist tract, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936.

Between Fascism and Stalinism

Expulsion from the party, exile, and brutal incarceration took their toll on the Bolshevik oppositionists. Some sought to return to the party fold, especially after Stalin appeared to have taken up some of their key polices, such as accelerated industrialization, from 1928 onward. For his part, Rakovsky rejected the idea of “capitulation” based on partial concessions from Stalin to the Opposition platform, demanding the complete restoration of party, soviet, and trade union democracy.

After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in January 1929, Rakovsky was now regarded as the leader of the Left Opposition inside the country. Despite his isolation and deteriorating health, Rakovsky wrote several forthright declarations in 1929–30, addressing the Central Committee directly and setting out the necessary preconditions for the Opposition to reenter political life. Thoroughgoing democratization was the essence of what Rakovsky sought.

In effect, these declarations were overtures for readmission to the party, implicitly calling for an alliance with Stalin’s “centrist” faction against figures of the “Right” such as Nikolai Bukharin. This approach worried some oppositionists, including Trotsky, who covertly expressed his reservations to Rakovsky.

Nevertheless, Rakovsky’s declarations were uncompromising and blistering critiques of “the autocracy of the apparatus” and the “violent” political repression it had engaged in. One communiqué provocatively demanded the “abolition of the post of general secretary” — the position held by Stalin himself.

After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, Rakovsky was now regarded as the leader of the Left Opposition inside the country.

Rakovsky and his cosignatories denounced Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country,” the forced march toward agricultural collectivization and industrialization, and the Great Russian bureaucratic centralism that was stifling the national republics of the USSR. They stressed the importance of restoring “party and workers’ democracy” as a way of reinvigorating the lapsed “revolutionary initiative of the masses.”

In the 1930s, these proved to be vain hopes. Stalinism was triumphant in the USSR and fascism was on the march elsewhere in Europe. Deported to Central Asia in 1932, the ailing Rakovsky lost all contact with Trotsky. News of Rakovsky being wounded in a failed escape attempt reached Trotsky at the end of that year.

Rakovsky’s Legacy

Worse was to come. On February 23, 1934, the Russian newspaper Izvestiia published the text of Rakovsky’s capitulation to the party. It alluded to the Nazi takeover in Germany a few weeks earlier as a reason to support Stalin’s leadership:

Confronted with the rise of international reaction, directed in the last analysis against the revolution of October, I consider it the duty of a Bolshevik Communist to submit completely and without hesitation to the general line of the party.

Rakovsky’s surrender came as a devastating blow to the beleaguered Left Opposition and Trotsky personally: “Rakovsky was virtually my last contact with the old revolutionary generation,” he wrote in his diary. “After his capitulation there is nobody left.” However, he did not personally condemn Rakovsky, blaming instead the extraordinary political pressures to which he had succumbed: “We can say that Stalin got Rakovsky with the help of [Adolf] Hitler.”

Four years later, in March 1938, at the height of the Stalinist terror, Rakovsky was named in the third Moscow show trial of old Bolsheviks as a member of a so-called “Trotskyite Center.” He was accused of conspiring with foreign intelligence agencies to overthrow the Soviet government. “The old fighter, broken by life,” Trotsky wrote on hearing of the accusation, “goes inescapably to meet his fate.”

And so it was, although his execution did not come until September 11, 1941. Rakovsky had confessed to concocted crimes because of “deception, blackmail, and psychological and physical violence,” in the words of a Supreme Soviet resolution from April 1988 that posthumously rehabilitated Rakovsky and readmitted him to the Communist Party.

The arc of Rakovsky’s life rose and fell with most heroic period of the international Marxist and labor movements and their defeat in the twentieth century, crushed between the fascist hammer and the Stalinist anvil. The repercussions of that defeat are still with us today, and not just in Ukraine, but worldwide.

Rakovsky’s legacy is both historical and contemporary. Forged as he was in the cauldron of the Balkan Wars and the catastrophe of World War I, his writings give us rich insights into the sensitivities of national oppression and the dangers of national chauvinism when harnessed by belligerent, rapacious imperial powers. Internationalism and participatory democracy defined Rakovsky’s socialism, manifest not only in his embrace of the October Revolution but in his unswerving determination to uphold those principles until the very end.

When and where organized labor’s been on the move.

(Elijah Nouvelage / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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